Superconducting Sensors
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The DMQIS Group develops superconducting sensors designed to detect the faint signals produced by particle interactions in cryogenic crystals as well as photon interactions with resonant superconducting structures.
- By coupling our sensors directly to phonon and charge systems in crystalline materials — including silicon (Si), germanium (Ge), silicon carbide (SiC), and diamond — we achieve detection thresholds at the meV-to-eV energy scale, opening a window into physics that conventional detectors cannot reach.
- The scale of these sensors (100s of microns to single mm) corresponds to the 100 GHz to 2 THz regime for fundamental antenna modes, and thus these structures all have external photon couplings at these frequencies. We study how to make superconducting circuits sensitive to single photons at these energies, as well as ways to mitigate unwanted radiation from coupling to our circuits.
Cryogenic Crystal Targets
Our sensors are engineered in close collaboration with the properties of our target materials. Each crystal offers distinct advantages:
- Silicon & Germanium — well-characterized phonon and charge transport properties make these ideal platforms for precision calibration and dark matter searches
- Silicon Carbide (SiC) — a wide-bandgap semiconductor with tunable properties, offering new sensitivity to low-mass dark matter
- Diamond — an exceptionally hard, high-Debye-temperature crystal that enables sensitivity to phonon excitations at the sub-eV scale (see here for a recent paper)
Detector Technologies
We design and deploy three classes of superconducting sensors, each suited to different signal types and energy regimes:
- Transition Edge Sensors (TES) — thin superconducting films operated at their transition temperature, providing exquisite energy resolution for both phonon and ionization signals
- Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs) — resonator-based sensors offering multiplexed readout and broad bandwidth, well-suited for large-scale detector arrays
- Qubit-Based Sensors — leveraging quantum information hardware to push detection sensitivity toward the single-phonon and single-charge-carrier limit. Within this class of sensors, we develop a broad set of applications: